Things look really good…if all you care about is money
Are things really getting better? Well, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ if you’re a monetary consequentialist (i.e., think all that matters is maximizing the amount of monetary resources in the...
View ArticleThe incoherence of Obama’s position on marijuana
U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent interview in the New Yorker was surprisingly interesting. While some have noted his disapproval towards a (hypothetical) son playing pro football out of...
View ArticleCompromising with Racism
Over at Slate, Tanner Colby has a critique of liberal US school busing policies that’s well worth reading. Some historical context: in the wake of Brown v. Board’s 1954 mandate to integrate school...
View ArticleA minimal proceduralist argument against Crimean independence
As the Ukrainian crisis continues to unfold, attention has shifted from the deposed president Viktor Yanukovych to the Crimea peninsula. Crimea has an ethnic Russian majority and as such are much less...
View ArticleThe Terror of Ignorance
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 along with its 239 passengers and crew has dominated recent news coverage. Hope for their survival has dimmed, and my thoughts and prayers are with...
View ArticleReporters Shouldn’t Embrace Bias
For a long time, objectivity and impartiality were perceived to be noble and uncontroversial goals for journalists. Objectivity is straightforwardly appealing – we want information that is accurate...
View ArticleThe Indignity of Imprisonment
Do we need to radically rethink the practice of imprisonment of criminals – not in the direction of novel forms of punishment, but rather in the form of vastly reducing punitive...
View ArticleFraming the Ebola epidemic
“CDC estimates Ebola epidemic could be over in Liberia and Sierra Leone by January!” So ran the headline of exactly no news outlets. Instead, a typical headline ran the following sort of dire...
View ArticleSinnott-Armstrong on Implicit Moral Attitudes
On October 30th, Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University gave the 2014 Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics. His talk, “Implicit Moral Attitudes”, concerned the practical and theoretical...
View ArticlePlausibility and Same-Sex Marriage
In philosophical discussions, we bring up the notion of plausibility a lot. “That’s implausible” is a common form of objection, while the converse “That’s plausible” is a common way of offering a sort...
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